Author: buddycushman

Everything so alive. Walking deliberately, like kinhin?

The morning alive with birds, hawks, sisters, cousins. Rarely possible to be so lazy – lazed strolling –

Every weed, wildflower, stalk of tall brown grass dancing, soft morning breeze. Women with dogs – free, free, free – ignore “Must be leashed.” Jets overhead, overhead flight path, coming, going.

Every single rock asks, “Would you like to hear my story?”

“Yes. Oh yes.”

Walking slowly. Hips, legs, feet deliberate, savoring every moment. Embodying the place of belonging utterly.

Slower and slower. Weekly, daily, these couple of hours.

Take it all in. Straight ahead, turn around, mountain, cows. Off to the right, west, geologic bulges on toward the Pacific. Vultures east, circling Sprouts, R.E.I., the 101. Staring with intention to really see. To own the day.

How long? How long to walk? How long to see – really see? To blog? To breathe like this?

Each and every step, out there in the spaciousness: Ground asking, “You don’t have to go just yet, do you?”

Nah. Not just yet.

Last week I made a decision to hike the Laguna Lake trail seven days in a row. This followed a conversation on Zoom with my Zen teacher. I began Saturday, today will be my third hike.

I was not and am not worried about repetition as ‘sameness.’ The ancient Japanese master Dogen said, “Tonight’s moon is not last night’s moon.” When I was a kid an old man named Mr. Baker would walk past my house and yard every day. Wearing the same hat, holding a cigar. But I would be different for him, playing catch by myself, throwing and bouncing a tennis ball off our slanting roof, one day over to the left and having to run that way to catch it, one day higher and needing to move back for that rebound. One day standing still, stupefied, so alive, so young. Each moment, never before, bursting forth, passing on.

Each Laguna Lake hike, never before, bursting forth, passing on. Like my mother – Irene Mercedes Costa, never before, bursting forth, passing on. Like Jorge’s dog Princess, never before, bursting forth, passing on. Like a rain storm. Bursting forth, never before, passing on.

Saturday, insane wind. Do rattlesnakes mind the wind? Does the wind mind rattlesnakes?. Sunday a gaggle of young girls with their leaders, on bicycles, sharing the path, nudging me off into the brown grass.

Life is interesting. I wrote in my Morning Pages the other day that I should feel lonely and I don’t. I was called to speak at one of ‘those meetings’ last Monday night and I said I’ve been in San Luis Obispo more than four months now and I’ve spent way more time with cows than with people. It got laughs but I didn’t say it for laughs. The grass is green, the hills are brown, I hang with cows.

Talk about flowers bloom on a withered tree. Talk about show don’t tell. Like, who needs words? I call her Angelina.

I do have a job around and interacting with lots of people, I do go to a couple of ‘those meetings,’ I do go to Starbucks nearly every day and feel joy from and offer joy back to a bunch of baristas with whom I’ve become quite close, in a coffee shop way.

The fact is, this Friday, mostly I feel called by the hills and mountains with their trails, and the woods and the beach in Avila, and my practice, which holds the coffees and cows and hillsides and vultures and scheduled people and my daily scribbles and all the lonesome minutes and hours and afternoons.

I can report, though, that Jorge, the only person I consider a friend at the Y, asked me Tuesday if I wanted to meet up and get a coffee Sunday. I said ‘Yes’ and that’s the plan, and I guess even at 76 practicing patience is simply little by slow.

From the Morning Pages, verbatim:

This is my (this) Sunday best. I got up with the phone wake-up at 2:59. Went to the bathroom, threw water on my face and my head, made the bed, bowed to the Buddha and the two kitties Mercedes and Lily on the bureau, drank water and came to the cushion in the darkened living room space and sat for 34 minutes.Then I bowed to the cushion nine times as suggested by Shunryu Suzuki and repeated the Four Boundless Vows into empty space.

Somewhere along the way I know I need to wash my sheets (did), and never judge how my sitting ‘went.’ Once, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I confronted a man and said, “Tell me how this program works.” He grinned and said, “Just fine.”

From the front seat of my car I told Gina Fiedel that I had finished the book – “Hunger Mountain” by David Hinton – which she had recommended, and that my experience was that the book had read me.

From the Morning Pages, verbatim — Gina asks, “What was it when the book was reading you?” Answer as Koan: “Blue bird in a tree.” That’s exactly it. “Cow giving birth.” “10,000 things dancing.” Being logical not it. Wild antics teasing. My cushion weeps, last night’s rain.

Give a dollar to a man on the street. Morning coffee perks, Winnipesaukee loon. Vultures singing. There’s no me to protect, to justify, to give a logical answer. Poetry no logical answers. “I’d like to fly on the back of a red-winged black bird.” Cat ‘n nine tails reflecting the new moon.

I stopped in the middle of the path, which was for the most part empty other than the rain-encouraged fragrance of eucalyptus, to have a wordless conversation with a blue jay skittering through branches in a willow tree.

I’m sitting in my car at the base of a mountain, reading Chinese poetry, listening to Sly and the Family Stone.

Yesterday in Starbucks I told the barista Morgan that when I arrived in San Luis Obispo my heart was entirely broken, and I came to his coffee shop every day and it put its arms around me, and saved me.

Saved me for this Monday afternoon, cloud-grayed sky, dancing alone at my mountain bench. But not slow dancing.

It’s said, “Flowers bloom on a withered tree,” and that’s exactly how I am, who I am, when I make the life of baristas brighter. When I act all goofy and child-like around little kids at the Y. When I call someone out of the blue in Queens, New York, who says he told his wife that very morning he was going to call me. When I sit on the cushion, and thrill to 4am coffee, read books I don’t want to understand, and generally feel the grace of each and every dawn.

I said to my landlord/housemate today that it felt quite okay to give up my two Saturdays a month at the Y – which I requested earlier – because I don’t spend money on anything other than peanut butter and books. It makes me really happy to be able to say things just like that. Even if I left out coffee.

There are writing implements, pencils and pens, scattered throughout the Camry – front and back seats, glove compartment, in the pocket of the console. In and around the room I rent as well – the only drawer in the fifteen-dollar desk, boxes of Bic and gel pens in the second drawer down of the flimsy trailer built-ins, on the bed (usually pencils), somewhere on the book shelves. Jean jacket pockets.

I grew up with, “You are what you eat.” and I could chatter long why I find that true in my life – bell peppers and peanut butter, yogurt and hot dogs. I also believe that I am what I write, and especially now these last seven or eight years, after half of the published books, the sentences and paragraphs and all the floating-alone words which fall out here – in this ‘Mountain Bench’ blog space and ‘Couch Surfing’ before. 

And especially in my Morning Pages. There’s a growing magic (loose loopiness no-mind) there, a thing I could never create or duplicate with intention. Three blank pages as host, all the crazy, far-out, look-in-the-mirror, down-the-rabbit-hole, scrambled, rock-and-rolled images painted in ink as guests. Falling out. Every single morning.

I’m thinking I’d like to mostly post some of those ‘Pages’ sentences here from the mountain bench through this week, and will note so daily when that’s how it goes.

When I was quite young back in my hometown I had a friend named Donnie, and we would often walk into the woods directly from the edge of his backyard. Those were the Everett Woods, and back before progress and housing developments, the only sign of people going deep into the woods was the fire road that traveled from South Main Street to Bodfish Avenue – like it sounds, a route for apparatus should there ever be a fire.

I tried reaching out to Donnie any number of times these past 10 years, until I was informed by his brother’s wife that Donnie had lost his memory. That means I’m the one who has to keep lit the memory of walking with Donnie in the Everett Woods – and the zillion times we went fishing – for both of us. It’s both a deep sadness, and an honorable invitation.

I find myself walking in woods often these days, and as my ‘practice’ continues and grows, I find myself more at home there. In the woods and as the woods. It sure would be great to have Donnie walking the Bob Jones Trail with me these days. Donnie pulled my ass out of the flames any number of times the middle years of this life I still get to live, and mostly remember.

There’s Donnie, with my youngest, Spenser (now 32).

My friend Gina Fiedel from Santa Barbara texted me this photo she snapped while traveling through Bosque Farms, New Mexico.

It so perfectly captures the “show, don’t tell” of what I’m forever trying to present as my daily weather here at fromamountainbench. Here in San Luis Obispo.

Less words. More that. Solitary boat.